After weeks of contentious negotiation, Donald Trump Jr. agreed on Tuesday to comply with the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr’s (R., N.C.) subpoena-backed demand that he sit for a private interview with members of the panel, the New York Times first reported.

Trump Jr. has reportedly agreed to speak to lawmakers about a limited range of topics for between two and four hours sometime in mid June.

Burr told fellow Republican senators last week that he was forced to issue a subpoena demanding Trump Jr.’s appearance after he skipped two previously scheduled appointments to sit for an interview, the Times reported on Sunday.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, President Trump called the Senate Intelligence Committee’s move to subpoena his son “unfair.”

“It’s really a tough situation because my son spent over 20 hours testifying about something that Mueller said was 100 percent okay. And now they want him to testify again. . . . I have no idea why, but it seems very unfair to me,” Trump said, referring to the closed-door testimony his son provided about the infamous Trump Tower meeting.

In the wake of Robert Mueller’s report, Democrats and a subset of Republicans have argued that the meeting, in which Trump Jr. and other campaign officials met with a Kremlin-linked attorney, warrants further investigation.

Like the president, Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has argued that compelling further testimony from Trump Jr. is an unnecessary act of political theater.

“You just show up and plead the Fifth, and it’s over with,” Graham told reporters on Monday. “You’d have to be an idiot as a lawyer to put your client back into this circus, a complete idiot.”

Other prominent Republicans, such as Kentucky senator Rand Paul, have chastised Burr from breaking ranks by continuing to pursue his investigation into Trump campaign activities after the conclusion of Mueller’s probe.

Apparently the Republican chair of the Senate Intel Committee didn’t get the memo from the Majority Leader that this case was closed… https://t.co/jvV5PIX266

In his report, Mueller explained that he and his team considered charging Trump Jr. and others with campaign-finance violations for agreeing to meet with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya to obtain damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

Lawmakers reportedly plan to press Trump Jr. on his previous claim that only Jared Kushner and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort were aware of Veselnitskaya’s offer, based on new evidence included in the Mueller report that suggests he informed the campaign’s entire senior staff.

Recommended Articles

Most Popular

If the Democrats are really tempted by impeachment, bring it on. Since the day after the 2016 election they have been threatening this, placing their chips on the Russian-collusion fantasy and then on the phantasmagoric charade of obstruction of justice. The attorney general accurately gave the ingredients of the ...
Read More

One of the more remarkable developments of the last 50 years is the relentless commitment of a segment of the American academic and cultural elite to selling a vision of American life that is slowly but relentlessly proving to be — on balance — more harmful for children and less joyful for adults, while also ...
Read More

A few weeks ago, I noted that Louisiana’s state legislature is contemplating legislation that would bar makers of cauliflower rice from labeling their product “rice,” contending that consumers will get confused. Instead, the rice growers want the product to be labeled . . . “riced cauliflower.”
But ...
Read More

In 2012, Barack Obama was still president, indeed had four years left in his presidency. "Gangnam Style" was a world-beating music video. Game of Thrones had just gotten started. And, oh yeah, the climate scientist Michael Mann sued National Review over a blog post.
Seven years later, this case has gone pretty ...
Read More

Celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti was indicted by federal prosecutors Wednesday for stealing the identity of his former client, Stormy Daniels, in order to claim more than $300,000 she was owed for a tell-all book about her efforts to expose President Trump.
In the indictment, prosecutors for the Southern ...
Read More

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has continued his turn toward conspiracy theory with a new essay. Inspired by our “Against Socialism” issue, it's titled “The New Socialism Panic Is the Right’s Trick to Justify Supporting Trump.” The central thesis of Chait’s submission is that National Review ...
Read More

Every presidential primary ends with one winner and a lot of losers. Some might argue that one or two once-little-known candidates who overperform low expectations get to enjoy a form of moral victory. (Ben Carson and Rick Perry might be happy how the 2016 cycle ended, with both taking roles in Trump’s cabinet. ...
Read More

Affixing one’s glance to the rear-view mirror is usually as ill-advised as staring at one’s own reflection. Still, what a delight it was on Wednesday to see a fresh rendition of “Those Were the Days,” from All in the Family, a show I haven’t watched for nearly 40 years. This time it was Woody Harrelson ...
Read More

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was ...
Read More